CrowdOptic Collects Series A For New Ways To Use Smart Phones
By Deborah Gage, Dow Jones VentureWire - 4/20/2011

CrowdOptic has raised $1 million in Series A funding for technology that allows people to point their smart phones at a moving object and have information broadcast back to them in real time.

The round was led by Chief Executive Jon Fisher, a serial entrepreneur who in 2007 sold a fraud-prevention company called Bharosa Inc. to Oracle Corp. Others who participated in the round include chief executives of public companies in the mobile space and an unnamed customer, Fisher said.

CrowdOptic's technology is being used by Moon Express Inc. to allow spectators to participate in the launch and tracking of its lunar landing technology. It places text captions on objects as they move past the phone.

The software is available for the iPhone and arose from technology that authenticates check images for banks. "Nobody else can use a cell phone to track a moving object with no integration with that target," Fisher said.

Moon Express, meanwhile, is part of NASA's Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data contract, which will help develop robotic lunar landing missions, and is a contender for Google's $30 million Lunar X Prize, a competition to send a robot to the moon.